Anyone Heard of This New Stat: Pitcher's Dominance Factor (PDF)?

[MikeS21]

Interesting read from Curt Shilling ...

http://38pitches.wordpress.com/2011/...inance-factor/

I'm trying to work through and follow some of the justification for this.

Thought? Comments?

[RedsManRick]

Very Bill Jamesian in it's construction. But it's unncessary. Look at FIP+, ERA+ (th3 minus versions are better for those, but harder to find) or one of the WAR variants instead and you'll get a very similar picture. Schilling is right, you need to contextualize performance relative to a players' peers. But that isn't anything close to "news" and his formula makes it way more complicated that necessary.

And if you want more granular than that, you can do it other ways that don't require the introduction of a new stat with a complex formula and an arbitrary scale.

I find it funny how people from the game who are new to sabermetrics or are trying to bridge the gap often create their own custom stats rather than simply learning and communicating the well-thought out and vetted stats already in existence.

[MikeS21]

The worst thing is that I'm not sure how easy it is to find the league average for ERA and BR9 for starting pitchers. Do they even show that stat on MLB.com or ESPN.com or some other free online site?

[Brutus]

Very Bill Jamesian in it's construction. But it's unncessary. Look at FIP+, ERA+ (th3 minus versions are better for those, but harder to find) or one of the WAR variants instead and you'll get a very similar picture. Schilling is right, you need to contextualize performance relative to a players' peers. But that isn't anything close to "news" and his formula makes it way more complicated that necessary.

And if you want more granular than that, you can do it other ways that don't require the introduction of a new stat with a complex formula and an arbitrary scale.

I find it funny how people from the game who are new to sabermetrics or are trying to bridge the gap often create their own custom stats rather than simply learning and communicating the well-thought out and vetted stats already in existence.

Everyone is throwing out a bunch of unnecessary new formulas these days. That's not just people new to sabermetrics. Baseball Prospectus has an alphabet soup of unnecessary custom stats.

I think, instead of criticizing those attempting to view the game in a different way because they don't meet our threshold, we should be celebrating their attempts.

That there is FIP, xFIP and all the other metrics isn't important. We still don't have one truly dominant measurement. So the real important question is how does this stack up when being tested against the others with correlation, standard error, etc. Until we know that, we shouldn't gawk at them

[Johnny Footstool]

Lots of people are trying to sell the emperor some new clothes.

[dougdirt]

I have seen another "dominance factor" stat for pitcher that was created several years ago that focused on groundball rates, strikeout rates and walk rates.

[RFS62]

I prefer the "Awesomeness Factor", with legendary Jim Coombs as the model.

Just sayin'.

[757690]

Very Bill Jamesian in it's construction. But it's unncessary. Look at FIP+, ERA+ (th3 minus versions are better for those, but harder to find) or one of the WAR variants instead and you'll get a very similar picture. Schilling is right, you need to contextualize performance relative to a players' peers. But that isn't anything close to "news" and his formula makes it way more complicated that necessary.

And if you want more granular than that, you can do it other ways that don't require the introduction of a new stat with a complex formula and an arbitrary scale.

I find it funny how people from the game who are new to sabermetrics or are trying to bridge the gap often create their own custom stats rather than simply learning and communicating the well-thought out and vetted stats already in existence.

Just for me, this new stat seems a lot simpler to understand than what you described, since is create one number that sums up what's most important for a pitcher to do. And this number is based on how well the pitcher did in comparison to all other starters that year.

It seems to be like wOBA, which does something similar on the offensive side. Or even WAR, which combines different important stats into one easy to understand number.

I think we need to be constantly creating new stats, and new approaches to stats. Isn't that the essence of Sabermetrics, to be constantly advancing our knowledge of the game? This might not be the best way to combine pitching stats into one number, but isn't that something we should be trying to accomplish?

No offense, but I see the "traditionalists" saying the same thing about FIP and OPS and WAR that you are saying about this stat. Why come up with new stats when you can just look at ERA and BA?